Maybe it should be reserved for nobody at all? Or some lottery system determining who gets to play tourist? All this jetting about to take the 1000,000th identical picture of some landmark just to say you've been there too is a very high cost to both the destinations and the planet as a whole.
Some people travel to meet locals, some people travel to watch sports, some people travel to just lay at the beach and feel the breathe, some people travel to try the food, some people travel to jump around museums and sights.
Nothing wrong with any type of travel, unless you're trying to brake local laws or disturb locals (those who try to meet locals no matter what could do that and not even see what they're doing).
For some reason westerners are not able to take easy loitering. Maybe because it's illegal in some states or countries, but in most places around the world it's perfectly legal. If you want to just walk around San Marco square, there's no one stopping you, even if you live in Slovakia or Mexico, or Canada. And there should not be anyone stopping you. It's a public place, it's there for everyone to enjoy. If local authorities think they're unable to maintain infrastructure, they still will be fine after implementing a city tax for visitors. But the nature of public spaces should and will be untouched.
As some who just had the dubious pleasure of sharing a vacation with his 19yo cousin, I can tell you that for her it was exactly like that.
Maybe it’s a well known fact, but I didn’t personally know this before I started working at a municipality, but there are entire departments who do nothing but plan. The best description of what they do, is that they play really complicated real world sim city, and at some level they draw “residential area”, “industry”, “commercial area”, “hotel” on a map, and those plans determine what we’re allowed to build on those locations.
If they plan correctly, there is a finite amount of hotels or holiday homes available in an area, and once those are full, the town or city can house no more tourists. This means that you could actually regulate how many people could physically visit London at any given time by limiting the amount of hotels and the amount of rooms a hotel was allowed to house with city planning.
Private rentals and popular apps to handle it, broke this system. At least until regulation catches up.
Here is a NY Times article from 1987 talking about the overcrowding problem and limiting the number of tourists in Venice.
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/08/world/venice-moves-to-lim...
Maybe this is just an American thing, but city planners in the US generally do not do any of that -- they exist solely to help property developers and landowners generate as much wealth as possible, as quickly as possible, so that the city can capture as much of the tax-base growth as possible.
Effectively zero thought is given to people, how they could live, work, transport themselves, utility infrastructure, schools, or anything of that nature. Affordability especially -- how real people are supposed to afford any of this -- is never ever planned for.
Planners talk about this all the time, of course, and love the illusion that their work somehow solves these problems. But in truth, they don't. And usually, the results of their effort are slightly worse than prior.
The only things planners routinely accomplish, are things that privatize urban core's wealth for the wealthy and/or increase taxable value of acreage -- things that make cities more expensive and less hospitable to human life.
> If they plan correctly, there is a finite amount of hotels or holiday homes available in an area, and once those are full, the town or city can house no more tourists
Is there any city that actually follows this? In the US, any idea of capping growth like this would get you labeled "anti-business", "NIMBY", and "economically illiterate". Capitalism demands infinite growth forever indefinitely (literally every facet of the whole world is just a commodity to be 'supply vs demand-ed', dontcha-know?), and any plan that limits that in any way would be immediately be rejected by every professional planner in the nation.
Yes? Many European cities are quite busy banning private rentals and requiring owners to actually live in their apartments. In my country it’s even illegal for foreigners to buy vacation homes.
Legislation moves a lot slower than the market though.
Those all seem like really great ideas. I wish we had anything as strong/effective as that in the US.
I'm very interested in planning best practices and not sure how to google this.
Growth is already capped in the U.S., your last paragraph doesnt make much sense. It’s also not government but the residents themselves who are to blame. Look at LA. Most of the city is low rise apartments or single family homes and there is a housing shortage pushing rents to astronomical levels. Developers want to make money by building supply to meet demand. They want to build towers. They want 2000 units in a parcel. They dont want to have to build 5 stories of subterranean parking. But the councilmans ear who can make these projects possible doesn't listen to the developers. A developer doesnt vote in the councilmans district. The NIMBYs who vote in council elections are the ones suing these projects for vaguely racist and myopic reasons, suing transit projects, suing infrastructure projects, burning precious public money in litigation hand over fist, and they get treated like princesses in council meetings because renters do not vote in LA, and who votes runs this city.
N=1 here, but that's nonsense where I live. Both the city and county have 10 year plans which describe how the area looks, feels, how people live, etc. Any significant changes (such as re-zoning residential to industrial, whatever) requires changes to both the city and county plans to be approved. These things simply do not happen willy-nilly or just because it brings in money.
Keep in mind that this is not a particularly liberal / progressive area. Maybe there are some places like you describe, but in my experience that's been very much the exception, not the rule.
Yes, they do. It maybe often be true that parties with intense financial interest like developers pay the most attention to, and provide the most input and pressure on, things like city/county General Plans, but those plans almost always address all those areas you suggest are not considered.
Now it is stay home, don't travel, don't eat meat, don't have kids, don't buy experiences or things. Ain't progress wonderful?
Note that the number of people that make meaningful connections with the locals compared to the number of tourists is vanishingly small. You just can't do that when you fly in on Sunday evening and leave again a few days later. All you get to do is to rush from one photogenic site to another, maybe visit a museum and eat at the local versions of the chain stores from somewhere else.
Slightly disagree with this. There's a lot of places where tourism should happen but doesn't. I've known a few people who raved about Syria, now obviously that's out of the question for tourists. Lots of African countries would make great tourist destinations but aren't safe enough to visit. In a world where every single person is able to take a two week holiday each year, we probably won't have as many poverty-stricken areas which aren't safe to visit.
Pollution caused by actually getting to places is another issue, but one that's slowly being solved.
There's a huge difference in ecological impact and cultural impact of package tours where you have ~30 people following one guide with a flag sticking out of their back vs one person spending month+ in a place and minimizing their ecological impact. The one thing I haven't been able to do yet is stop flying, it's required both for work and for pleasure, but I do buy carbon offsets for air travel.
I just don't know how to clearly separate the types of activities I'm talking about without it automatically coming off as elitist when these types of discussions happen... it's not really fair, but the reality is that the Western world had enough various constraints that helped make tourism if not perfectly sustainable, relatively so. With Asia coming up we've added literally billions of potential new tourists to the pot and that's just not scalable. It's even very obvious to me, as I try to visit places which are not tourist destinations... and I visit off-season. I don't really care for tourism itself, I want to meet people and discover food. I go to these places to find not English dual-language, but Mandarin Chinese...
These will all broaden your horizons equally well as flying to another country. It's showing you your own country as an infinite fractal of human experience.
Oh, and the government here is doing just that.
Then what are you complaining about?
Like everything else, motivations for travel are many and varied; most people probably have several. Reducing them all to bragging rights is an overly reductive and unhelpful view.
That's only one reason for tourism and is not a motivation we all share. That said, this is perhaps another externality of social media that we should seek to redress, alongside the concerns with privacy and manipulation.
Instagram doesn't really help anyone when it sends thousands of people to a landmark, so they can take photos of themselves in front of it.
They would sell the tickets, and we'd be back where we started, unless they have to travel alone and can't bring any companion.
IATA forecasts that by 2037 Asia-Pacific will have more air travelers than North America and Europe combined.
Source: https://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2018-10-24-02.aspx
Where?
Although I'm slight worried for the coping ability of highly touristic places, I think it's great that tourism is becoming more accessible to everyone.
There's no reason why visiting famous cultural places should be reserved for the wealthy only. The wealthy have found new places to hide away from the great unwashed anyway.